The Ghazal Guides the Way: Iqbal, Rumi, and the Poetics of Inspiration

This talk will be presented by Dr. Francesca Chubb-Confer, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Oberlin University. This talk considers the figure of the teacher-guide and questions of influence, inheritance, and transmission through the poetic relationship between Muhammad Iqbal and his self-appointed pir, Rumi. It focuses specifically on the role of Rumi in Iqbal’s 1932 Javednama (“Book of Eternity”), a modern verse epic with genealogies drawn from both Rumi’s Masnavi and Dante’s Divine Comedy, among others: the protagonist, guided by Rumi, ascends from Earth through the celestial spheres of the planets, encountering historical and literary figures from Nietzsche to the Buddha to the Sufi martyr Hallaj. This talk argues that the pedagogical relationship between Rumi and Iqbal in this text reflects both Rumi’s masnavi and ghazal poetics, and suggests different capacities for the two forms as they both work with and against one another from one verse to the next. The juxtaposition of the two forms mark out moments of productive poetic tension that also mirror the artistic relationship between Iqbal and Rumi, with the anxiety of influence most keenly felt in the moments of transition to the ghazal voice, as Iqbal strives to both position himself as the inheritor and preserver of the classical Persian tradition and its reformer for the era of colonial modernity.

Presented by the Religious Studies Program. Cosponsored by the Departments of History, Philosophy, and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.